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Oil
and war do mix This document was provided by: The VivaVine (Fall 2001, Vol. 10, No. 4)Note: The
information on this website is not a substitute Determining how many people the Earth can feed is a subject essayist Bill McKibben has ventured to examine, even though he believes that anyone with any sense would want to refrain from speculating on such a thing. Surely Thomas Malthus was proved wrong, wasn't he? Still, the author asks in a May 1998 Atlantic Monthly essay on the carrying capacity of planet Earth, who's to say that the classic doomsayer can't be proved right in the next 50 years? Evidence is everywhere that we do indeed live, as he puts it, "in a special moment in history." The key, McKibben believes, is in consumption. These days, the impact of population numbers can get lost pretty quickly when the amount of Earth's resources each person uses is added to the equation. McKibben offers a compelling image: In hunter/gatherer times, the amount of energy a person needed was roughly equivalent to the amount of energy required for a dolphin, about 2,500 calories per day. Today, the worldwide average for energy use is about 31,000 calories, mostly in the form of fossil fuel, or the amount of energy required for a pilot whale to live. (Okay, so we live in a motorized world filled with laborsaving mechanization.) But then we get to the zinger: "The average American uses six times that--as much as a sperm whale....It's as if each of us were trailing a big Macy's-parade balloon around, feeding it constantly." We in the United States do love our SUVs; Detroit can't seem to make enough of them. Meanwhile, as Cornell University ecologist David Pimentel explains, "Animal protein production requires more than eight times as much fossil-fuel energy as production of plant protein." Now keep imagining that sperm whale. The next question is, could our extraordinary consumption of fossil fuel have anything to do with antagonizing a certain band of Middle Eastern religious fanatics, namely the al-Qaeda network? Would this unstable bunch care a hoot about us--"infidels" though we may be--if we did not interfere in their part of the world, mainly for the purpose of keeping those barrels of oil rolling?I think not. |